Thanks to development of modern industry and extreme leisure and sports, every field has to address urgently two severe issues, namely vibrations and impacts. Vibrations and impacts may deteriorate operation precision, reduce service life of products, pose hazards to workers, and cause environmental pollution. Hence, it is important to absorb and abate vibrations and impacts.
Conventional shock-absorbing pads in wide use have drawbacks as follows: high rubber viscosity, poor oil resistance, poor damping performance, poor impact resistance, poor fatigue resistance and high costs. Although shear thickening fluids are good at damping and highly resistant to impacts, they are liquid and thus hardly practicable.
Ordinary composite fluids have their viscosity reduced under a shear force. By contrast, the viscosity (within a specific range thereof) of shear thickening fluids, which are non-Newtonian fluids, is proportional to the shear force; hence, shear thickening fluids turn rigid under an external force.
Conventional shear thickening fluids are composed of polyethylene glycol and silicon dioxide composite. However, they are neither stable nor resistant to a shear force, because polyethylene glycol is highly hygroscopic.
A conventional method of making a damping pad method involves mixing and blending a matrix with various additives in a phase-separation manner, mulling the mixture at a predetermined temperature, and foaming the mulled mixture with a specific die. With the matrix being different from the additives in the materials they are made of, the resultant damping pad is problematic in terms of quality, performance, production costs, and environmental protection.